Houston Cancer Quack gets a message

This morning, a group calling itself Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients (SPCP) has delivered controversial cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski a birthday present: a $13,000 donation in his honor to St. Jude Children’s Research hospital. The SPCP says that St. Jude’s is a well-respected, compassionate institution that does real research into childhood cancers, unlike the Burzynski Clinic, which has never produced the results of a single large scale peer-reviewed clinical trial in a reputable journal in over 30 years, despite apparently having treated thousands of patients with so-called “antineoplastons”.

They’ve now asked Burzynski to match that donation.

Unfortunately, Burzynski bilks so much money from his victims, hundreds of thousands of dollars from each, that he’s going to be able to lift a butt cheek and fart out that much money. The question is whether he’ll even bother to exert himself that much.

I’m predicting he won’t, since that would involve actually acknowledging the rebuke, not because he’s unable to afford that much.

He is scum who has bilked large sums of money from people, but to wish his death is not cool.

And probably won’t stop his “clinic” from “treating” “patients”, even if he happens to die of cancer after following his own quack treatment, or chooses to get a real treatment for his cancer, if he happens to get one.

Quack treatments don’t disappear after their creator’s deaths, not even after being resoundingly disproven.

He is scum who has bilked large sums of money from people, but to wish his death is not cool.

Really? Bilking money is his greatest crime? Or perhaps hastening the death of, or preventing effective treatment of people that are sick is a greater crime and he actually deserves the same. I’m not a violent person but anyone representing themselves as a medical professional while doing what this man does… I really have no words for how reprehensible this is and how much of a waste of skin this man is.

Thanks, PZ, for shining a light into that hazy shadow wherein dwells Burzynski. He is a peddler of a particular venomous snake oil. His entire house is framed with the hopes and fears of desperate people and frantic parents. The list of children and adults that have gone to sad deaths paves the path to his front door. His biography may one day be written with the inscriptions of headstones that mark lives abridged by wishful thinking, hollow promises and emptied bank accounts.

His story is a sterling example of why alternative medicine, the gullibility that sustains it and the widespread disdain of science based medicine needs to be brought to the forefront of public attention.

The more light that is shone on him the better his self-centered megalomania can be seen. How he has managed to escape the laws meant to combat fraudulent medical practice speaks as loudly of the failure of those laws as it does of his failure as both a health care provider and as a human being.

Please, readers, if you haven’t already, do a Google search of “Burzynski Clinic”. Have some tissues handy because if you pursue some of the links, you will weep.

The more articles like this the better. They all ensure that Google and Bing search results are peppered with links to sites critical of his treatment and his failure to supply any evidence despite 60+ trials that it does anything at all.